The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates Purpose

In the introductory piece to the second section of The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, "The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates" a mother told her daughter to not ride her bicycle around the corner, since it was outside the protection of their house, and in a book, The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, all the bad things that could happen out of the protection of the house is written.  The girl doesn't believe her mom and requests to see it, but her mom tells her she cannot read it, since it is in Chinese, and the mom does not tell her daughter the bad things, so she bikes off, and fell before she reached the corner.  The story portrays a complex mother-daughter relationship, and the cultural differences they had between them.

In "Rules of the Game," written from Waverly Jong's character, she encounters a large cultural gap between her and her mother, and both have a strained relationship, the mother having different opinions from her daughter, and trouble communicating with each other clearly.   Waverly's "mother's eyes turned into dangerous black slits.  She had no words for me, just sharp silence" (pg.99) when Waverly told her mother that if she wanted to show off, then she should learn to play chess herself.  Their relationship becomes more difficult when Waverly runs away from her mother, and comes back home late at night.  Her mother tells the family, ""We not concerning this girl.  This girl not have concerning for us'" (pg.100).  Because Waverly did not show that she considered her family and her mother's feelings as much as she cared about her own feelings and opinions, Lindo (her mother) tells her family to not show concern for her, like she did to them.

In "The Voice from the Wall," written by Lena St. Clair, the mother and daughter have cultural differences that divide them.  Lena "could understand the words [her mother said] perfectly, but not the meanings" (pg.106).  Because Lena's mother, Ying-Ying, spoke Mandarin and a little bit of English, she had trouble communicating with her, since she grew up in an American environment with her father, "who spoke only a few canned Chinese expressions" (pg.106)